Scalability Engine Guidelines for SolarWinds Orion Products

Your Orion Platform product installation consists of a Main Polling Server (Orion Web Console and the Main Polling Engine), and the Orion Database Server. Polling engines gather device statistics and store the information on the Orion Database Server. The Main Polling server reads the stored information from the Orion Database Server.

Your Main Polling Engine polls a definite number of elements depending on the Orion Platform product. Too many elements on a single polling engine can have a negative impact on your SolarWinds server. When the maximum polling throughput on a single polling engine is reached, the polling intervals are automatically increased to handle the higher load. To keep default polling intervals, you need to add polling capacity.

What is a scalability engine?

"Scalability engine" is a general term that refers to any server that extends the monitoring capacity of your SolarWinds installation, such as Additional Polling Engines, Additional Web Servers, or High Availability backups.

How do I improve the monitoring capacity?

Install an Additional Polling Engine to disperse the load between multiple servers.

Install an Additional Web Server to balance the load on the Main Polling server, for example when more users are logged in at the same time, or in secured environments where you have your Orion Platform products behind a firewall.

For NPM and SAM, poll more elements by using multiple Additional Polling Engine licenses on a polling engine ("stacking").

Additional Polling Engines can cope with database outages, handle bad or slow connections, and work over WAN. Additional Polling Engines use Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) to enable the local storage for up to 1 GB of polled data per polling engine to prevent data loss when the connection between the polling engine and the database is temporarily lost.

How do I know that I need to scale my Orion Platform product?

When you exceed a polling engine capacity, Orion Platform products notify you about it.

See the Notifications in the Orion Web Console.

Review your alerts. If the Polling rate limit exceeded out-of-the-box alert is enabled, the alert sends an email and adds an entry to All Active Alerts.

Go to the Polling Settings page in the Orion Web Console. Click Settings > All Settings, and then click Polling Settings under Thresholds & Polling.